seishino

This is not a feel-good movie. This is not a movie that will give you a sense of accomplishment over impossible odds, or will leave you imbued with the permanence of human spirit and love. This is a gripping, gritty, sad tale of one man's descent into the mess that he helped architect. In that respect, it is an incredibly compelling movie. The subject matter is an only vaguely masked parable about the squalid conditions in South African relocation camps. We the audience become exposed to the details of power politics, acquiring food, having children, and making a living in the middle of this disposed community. We see the abuses of the haves from the have-nots, and the dark ways the have-nots respond.

The Science Fiction aspects are never backseat to the political messages. How the bug society functions, and more importantly how the humans respond to it, are all thoroughly and uniquely fleshed out. The movie never loses focus on the meaning of human interactions, but the science aspects are simultaneously well fleshed out.

Do not go into this movie expecting Aliens, Total Recall, Close Encounters, or Men in Black. This is a very different experience, similar in tone to a World War 2 biopic. I'd consider it one of the most "important" movies Hollywood has produced this decade. It isn't fun, or satisfying, or pleasant. But it is deeply meaningful, and very much worth experiencing.

Pony Trouble is a look at how childlike wonder and joy twist into self-serving hedonism when sheltered suburban youth unprepared for the real world wake up with sexual energy and social drive. The social commentary of this movie is deep and wide.

And at the other end of the spectrum, the plot of the movie itself is just awful. The dialog seems to hover somewhere between adequate and amusing, but you wouldn't know it because the dialog is frequently impossible to hear. The plot (as it is) never gets old because it careens and jolts like a super ball thrown down the side of MT Everest. There is an entire sub-plot about a vampire that is A: never explained and B: never resolved. Even using terms like sub-plot seem inapplicable to this movie, which feels akin to flipping channels when every station is covering vastly different aspects of the same event.

This is not unusual for the movie. People get their head cut off. Drunken half-naked women press up into glass doors. Plots die off as fast as characters. Robots show up. People put on beards and kiss while downing pills. The acting is surprisingly good considering what the actors had to work with, but Pony Trouble was clearly made by unfunded film students to be as bad as possible.

In the grand scheme of things, Pony Trouble is downright awful. But A: it is wonderfully awful, B: it is never boring, and C: it does stick with you. Its driving strength is in just how often it breaks the rules of film-making. If you're looking for the next Clerks, you may want to look elsewhere. If you're looking for pure camp for a college get-together, this film is attack-of-the-killer-tomatoes worthy.

I'm tempted to call Juno a comedy, but that isn't really correct. It's a dramatically gripping film, with real characters, that happens to be quite frequently funny. The humor generally comes through acid-sharp dialog, which is both sublimely human and thoroughly well written. The drama, however, comes out through characters which are neither black nor white. One moment a character will be portrayed engaging in a creepy and negative act, the next they will be viewed in a sympathetic light. Everyone is behaving with the best of intentions, and we as the audience get to ride along as those intentions twist the characters into an ugly reflection of us all. The excellent acting across the board helps this tremendously.

It's a quite sympathetic movie overall, and nobody comes off looking like "a bad guy." It's a solidly written, acted, and directed piece, that all comes together to feel grander than a simple family story. This may very well be the best coming-of-age film for years to come.